The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Adam Miller is one of more than a dozen candidates running for mayor of Los Angeles, but unlike some of his rivals, he comes from the worlds of tech and nonprofit management rather than politics. Miller founded the e-learning company Cornerstone and the homelessness prevention nonprofit Better Angels, and says he entered the race because he believes the city's failures — especially around homelessness — are fundamentally operational.

In this conversation, Miller explains why encampments persist outside housing facilities, why affordable housing costs have spiraled, why shelters can sit half-empty, and why the city still lacks basic real-time data on homelessness. He also addresses the strange dynamics of a campaign unfolding in an attention economy where reality star Spencer Pratt has emerged as a serious contender. Miller argues that while he and Pratt often identify the same problems, he has the management experience to actually implement solutions.

Guest Bio:

Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and chief executive of the nonprofit Better Angels, is running for mayor of Los Angeles.

Writer and cultural critic Phoebe Maltz Bovy joins Meghan to discuss her new book, The Last Straight Woman, an exploration of how heterosexual women became suspect — if not pitifully uncool — in progressive culture. They talk about everything from Tumblr-era feminism and the post-#MeToo recalibration of gender politics to the television series Sex and the City and Girls, "photogenic feminism," bachelorette parties at gay bars, late-in-life lesbians, hookup culture, and why admitting you're a "boring straight woman" may now qualify as a radical act. We also revisit the "lesbian chic" era of the 1990s (my personal heyday), the discourse around the viral New Yorker short story Cat Person, the appeal (and limits) of sexual fluidity narratives, and the cultural overlap between straight female culture and gay male sensibilities. Bonus: They switched gears in the last 15 minutes and did a Deep Dive™ into the subject of buying secondhand clothing from online marketplaces such as Poshmark. This portion is available to paying subscribers. To upgrade your subscription, go to https://www.theunspeakablepodcast.com/subscribe. Guest Bio: Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a Toronto-based cultural critic and the author. She is co-host, with Kat Rosenfield, of the Feminine Chaos podcast, Opinion Editor at The Canadian Jewish News, and host of the Canadian Jewish News podcast, The Jewish Angle. She contributes regularly to The Globe and Mail and is the author of The Perils of "Privilege" (St. Martins, 2017). She also runs a Substack called Close-Reading the Reruns with Phoebe Maltz Bovy.

Meghan's guest is Spencer Pratt, candidate for Los Angeles mayor. Yes, that Spencer Pratt — the producer-crafted villain from The Hills who later blew a fortune on moldavite crystals and Birkin bags before settling into a quieter life raising a family in Pacific Palisades. That house burned down in the Palisades Fire in January 2025, and what followed was a political awakening that has put him in second place in the June 2 primary.

Meghan sat down with him at his burned lot to talk about the fires, the homelessness crisis, the billions in homeless services funding that a federal audit couldn't account for, animal abuse on Skid Row, and why he thinks an outsider with no political debts is the only person who can fix a city that's been broken for decades.

This version includes a short introduction. For the full ten-minute introduction with additional context, find the Substack version at theunspeakablepodcast.com.

Meghan's guest this week is British journalist and author Brendan O'Neill, chief political writer at Spiked and author of Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy. Brendan talks about what he sees as a growing "vibe shift" away from elite consensus and toward something like common sense—though not without its own distortions. He and Meghan discuss the UK's role in pushing back on gender ideology (aka "TERF Island"), the uneasy state of free speech on both sides of the Atlantic, and why ordinary people seemed to tolerate cultural excesses until they suddenly didn't. They also touch on the rise of unserious, meme-driven politics, the infantilization of public discourse (with Greta Thunberg as an emblematic if also profoundly dysfunctional figure), and the strange convergence of hectoring moralism on one side and gleeful nihilism on the other. Finally, Brendan reflects on his own journey from revolutionary communist to free speech absolutist, and why he thinks we may be inching slowly back toward a politics grounded less in identity and more in reality. Guest Bio; Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer at Spiked and host of The Brendan O'Neill Show. He's also the author of several books, including Anti-Woke, A Duty to Offend, A Heretic's Manifesto, and most recently, Vibe Shift: The Revolt Against Wokeness, Greenism and Technocracy.

Hadley Freeman is a U.K.-based journalist, Sunday Times columnist, and the author of Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia. She joins the podcast this week to discuss what she calls the "thinness arms race" in the era of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs. She and Meghan talk about why extreme thinness is once again being rewarded—if not demanded—of female celebrities, how the current aesthetic differs from 90s heroin chic, and why the language of body positivity is often used to shut down obvious observations. They also talk about the physical and psychological realities of severe undernourishment, the role of status and self-denial in shaping beauty standards, and the broader "cartoonification" of the human body in a culture increasingly mediated by filters, pornography, and screens.

Before the episode begins, Meghan has a quick but important message about her April Fool's Day episode with "guest" Amanda Gertz-Hurdy.

Guest Bio:

Hadley Freeman is a staff writer at The Sunday Times. Her latest book, Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia, was published in 2023.

This week's guest is Estela Lopez, Executive Director of the LA Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, which encompasses Los Angeles's Skid Row. With 25 years on the job and a lifetime in the neighborhood, Estela is one of the most clear-eyed, unsparing voices when it comes to what homelessness actually looks like at the ground level. In this conversation, she and Meghan talk about how a thriving industrial district became the nation's most concentrated homeless encampment, why Estela sees this less as a homelessness crisis than a lawlessness crisis, and how the open-air drug economy makes every other intervention nearly impossible. They also talk about the limits—and often the folly—of harm reduction policy, how COVID chaos led to the collapse of enforcement, and what the "housing first" approach gets wrong.

Guest bio: Amanda Gertz-Hurdy is a certified journaling coach, a top-rated curiosity practitioner, a mom to twins, and the author of The Curiosity Workbook: How to Stand in Your Truth, Sit in Your Intention, and Kick Ass by Cultivating Curiosity.

Bestselling novelist and commentator Lionel Shriver returns to the podcast to dicuss what might be her most controversial book yet. A Better Life takes on immigration through the story of a progressive Brooklyn woman who opens her home to a migrant. In this interview, she and Meghan discuss the book's themes and central characters, including the deliciously complicated Nico, a basement-dwelling fan of manospheric podcasts, and the role of the family's sprawling, Queen Anne-style house, which is almost a character in itself. They also talk about demography, population decline, and the cultural shift from seeing children as the default to seeing them as an elective. Lionel was a contributor to Meghan's 2015 book Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On the Decision Not To Have Kids, and they revisit their respective choices in that regard, what people really mean when they talk about happiness and fulfillment, and why sacrifice may be more central to a meaningful life than our culture likes to admit. Guest Bio: A prolific journalist with a fortnightly column in Britain's The Spectator, Lionel Shriver has written widely for the New York Times, the London Times, the Financial Times, Harper's Magazine, and many other publications. She has written 16 novels, including Mania, Should We Stay or Should We Go, The Mandibles, and We Need to Talk About Kevin, and her work has been translated into 35 languages. Her latest novel is A Better Life.

This week Meghan is joined by actor, humorist, and six-time author Annabelle Gurwitch, who returns to the podcast to discuss her new memoir, The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker.

Annabelle was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer during COVID, entirely out of the blue, after what she assumed was a meaningless cough. Five years later, she remains an outlier on a targeted therapy that has kept her stable. In this conversation, Annabelle talks about how she has resisted the sentimental clichés surrounding illness, why she rejects the idea that cancer is a "battle," and how humor, contrarianism, and facing "the shipwreck of the soul" have shaped the way she lives now.

Guest Bio:

Annabelle Gurwitch is an actress, activist, and New York Times bestselling author of six books and two-time finalist for the Thurber Prize.

Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and Hadassah Magazine, among other publications. Her six books include the New York Times bestseller and Thurber Prize finalist I See You Made an Effort.

Annabelle co-hosted the fan favorite Dinner & a Movie on TBS, was a regular commentator for NPR. She is serving in leadership as a patient advocate with the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC).